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their backs on this new audience-Gissing is a famous example,
preferring poverty to the readership of what he called "the quarter–
educated." But Bennett decided to do something about it, and in
1909 wrote a book called
Literary Taste: How to Form It.
In it he tried
to purge literary culture of its class associations. Taste, he affirmed,
is not a matter of merely elegant accomplishment, a "certificate of
correct culture." It is a matter rather of wanting to live to the full; not
to know literature is not to be alive. Surround yourself with books,
he advises; create a bookish atmosphere, cultivate the classics. Don't
bother to take courses in literature or study it chronologically;
·"wherever you happen to be , that is the centre of literature ." He adds
that if you buy your books in large enough quantities you can insist
that the bookseller give you a discount large enough to purchase the
thirty-shilling three-volume
Chambers' Cyclopaedia of Literature.
It was this sort of advice that gave Bennett his reputation as a
vulgar fellow, a reputation greatly enhanced by his later
Evening
Standard
book columns , which gave him enormous power in the
world of books but cost him the respect of the discerning (yet those
columns compare very well, as to the range and quality of judge–
ment, with anything of the kind available today). Some of his points
you might have thought the learned would approve. For instance, he
endorsed Mark Pattison's pronouncement that you can't call yourself
a booklover unless you spend five percent of your income on books .
Ben Jonson, Campion, Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, Ford, and
dozens of others could be had at one shilling each; so a clerk making
two pounds a week could be expected to acquire a hundred volumes
a year. Bennett's canon contains a lot of books long since consigned
to limbo, but the same fate would attend almost anyone's attempt to
achieve the same end, which was to establish a community of
literacy in which his own and comparable work could live and im–
part the means of life.
Gissing could have told him it wouldn't work, and Bennett, be–
ing a highly adaptable man, inevitably wrote for two audiences, one
perceptive and the other not. For example, he was to take legitimate
pride in the mastery of
Riceyman Steps,
a novel that should not be
forgotten when the achievements of the
anni mirabiles,
the early twen–
ties, are celebrated; but he condemned the public for seizing on the
wrong reason for admiring it. They ignored the art of the book and
formed an attachment to its portrait of a kindhearted charwoman;
Bennet thought this deplorable, but still wrote a sequel about the
charwoman expressly designed to cash in on that misreading . He
